


Heart's Delight

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 14:17:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19111384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: Gratefully she slides one hand into his pocket alongside his. Not palm to palm, but his fingers find the spaces between hers to weave together by habit anyhow."Sorry," she says. "Should've brought gloves.""No," he says. "I like your hand here."Only decades of practice at hearing each other over any cacophony, speaking without speaking under their breath, makes her sure he'll understand her when she murmurs, "Where else do you like my hand."





	Heart's Delight

They arrive separately in St. John's, a day in advance of any obligations. Tessa first, in the afternoon, retrieved from the airport by a driver in a black Continental, and Scott late in the evening, well after the fifteen-dollar lobster she'd enjoyed by herself in the diner a short distance down the hill on Water Street. The first she hears from him, when she's in the bath, is a text message, inquiring as to the cable in her room. His is out, and the Raptors game is on.

She calls him immediately.

"You can watch my TV, but you better bring me a good bribe," she says.

She opens the door to his knock a few minutes later, wrapped in a floral silk robe from home. He greets her with an armful of snacks and cans from the vending machine down the hall, and a bottle of Glen Grant single malt in a bag from the duty free.

"How was your flight?" he asks, once he’s settled in on the other side of the bed from her, a tactful arm's length and half a dozen snack-sized bags of Doritos between them.

"A little turbulent," she says. "Yours?"

"Long," he says, and pours her a drink, a generous slug of scotch in a plastic cup from the nightstand topped up with Pineapple Crush.

"What's the name of this fascinating cocktail," she says.

"I just invented it," he says. "Patent pending. The Jet-Lagged Townie."

He pours another for himself. She doesn't have a palate for scotch, but she imagines that any distinctiveness it may have had would be overwhelmed by the soda in any event, and she downs it.

"How's your girlfriend," she says.

"We're at work," he says. "No personal lives at work."

"Right," she says.

He turns the volume up slightly, and she takes the hint.

During a time out near the end of the game, he asks, "Whatcha reading?" His tone is conciliatory.

"Couple of things," she says. One of them, sitting closed on the nightstand, is a memoir she'd set aside because the author's family was from Ferryland and she was reluctant to finish it before the sightseeing tour that would take them there. The other, a history of the inshore fishery, was slower going.

"No one's on this trip to ask us about economic development," he says, glancing at the spine of the paperback in her hand.

"Economic crisis actually, but I'm not reading it for that," she says, which is not altogether true.

She'd spent the preceding month committing trivia to memory, watching Newfoundlanders pronounce placenames in YouTube videos so she'd sound more like a thoughtful host and less like a careless come from away even with the suburban southern Ontario accent. Quidi Vidi; the pattern of stressed syllables in Labrador.

"Did you know," she adds, "That it's illegal for someone to just row out in their own boat and catch a cod for themselves with a fishing rod? Since the nineties."

"So how come I could eat cod for dinner downstairs tonight," he says.

"Gimme a minute, I'm sure this'll say soon," she says.

"Did you know that we're within shouting distance of the easternmost point in North America," he says. "Cape Spear. I heard someone say so at the airport."

"I'm going back to my book," she says.

It all catches up to her at once during postgame analysis, which Scott has left on with the volume low: the week of early call times she’d had leading up to this trip, the predawn departure from Toronto, the two-hour layover in Halifax, the scotch. Yawning, she sets the book aside and reaches for her calves, stiff from the flights and the brisk walk up Signal Hill she'd indulged in before dinner.

"Give me those," says Scott, and leans forward to pull her feet into his lap. "If you want," he adds. His hands hover awkwardly over her, without touching.

"You still owe me for the cable," she says, and stretches languidly.

Scott rubs the knots out of her calves, basketball analysis forgotten. His hands linger on her when he's finished, fingers circling one ankle, and she drifts off that way, stretched across the bed, her feet still in his lap, not waking when he slips out from underneath her and tucks the duvet around her shoulders, but only for a drowsy few moments when she registers the soft click of the door closing behind him.

There's hardly time alone the next day, nearly every moment accounted for, and she inhabits with ease the work persona in which she is gracious and accommodating. In the evening Scott catches her eye from the next table at the pub before rattling off her trivia about the illegality of handlining cod; when a flight of local beers is deposited on his table, she finds an excuse to stroll past, and saves him from mispronouncing the name of an ale in front of the donors.

"Wanna be the first people on the continent to watch the sun rise tomorrow," she says when they're about to part ways in front of his room, surprising herself. The thought had occurred to her when she was reading Newfoundland trivia weeks ago to prepare for the trip and again when Scott mentioned the cape, but she had quelled it as soon as it arose.

Scott pauses with his hand on the doorknob.

"What time," he says. "I don't think we could get away with missing breakfast, but that's not until—"

"Sunrise is at quarter after five, and it's a twenty-minute drive, I looked it up, so we'd be back before six-thirty," she says.

"Breakfast at seven and then the van leaves at eight," he finishes. "Yeah, okay."

"Meet me at four-thirty?" she says.

"In the lobby, yeah," he says.

Her four o'clock alarm is unnecessary; the rattle of the wind through the blinds of the window she'd left open a crack overnight rouses her early.

With the Keurig on the desk she makes coffee for herself, three Splendas, in the stainless steel vacuum-insulated thermos she'd brought with her from home; then rethinks it, decants it into the flimsy plastic branded promotional cup the tour manager had handed her when she arrived. She makes another for Scott, black and unsweetened, in the thermos.

He's already in the lobby at quarter past four, a Tim Hortons cup in each hand.

"I brought you—" she says.

"—coffee," he says.

He proffers one of his paper cups. She fumbles the thermos into her bag.

"Your hands are full, I'll drive us," he says. "But you gotta tell me new trivia on the way, because I'm all out."

Rain lashes in the front door when he opens it for her and escorts her out into the gale.

"Looks like she'll rain later on," calls the nightshift clerk after them.

He's quiet as the GPS in his rental SUV guides them south toward the two-lane highway that leads to the cape. In duplicate the streetlights flash past them, reflected on the wet pavement.

"Did you know that there used to be a radio show on CBC about an alternate reality version of Newfoundland," she says as the city recedes into the distance behind them. "It sounded like a regular arts and culture show, like a local  _Q_  kind of thing, but everyone was a character and all the news was fake. I listened to an episode on my flight out, and it was an archival recording of the time a whole rowing team died at the regatta. Screams and everything. Excited fifties radio announcer voice narrating the whole deal. Same yacht club we're going to later."

"Fake archival recordings," says Scott. "If you tell me fake trivia I'm gonna repeat it to the donors by accident, and that'll be it for our career as fundraisers. How's your book, how about another cod fact."

She'd fallen asleep over the fishery history two nights in a row, and it takes her a few moments to recall one.

"The recreational fishery wasn't the problem," she finally says. "The one that got banned? It didn't ruin the cod stocks, the trawlers did."

"Weren't there quotas, or something," says Scott.

"This author I'm reading thinks the management was the problem," she says. "Like they were so confident they knew all the factors and had all the information about what stresses the population could handle, but the cod went extinct anyway."

"Mismanagement, I guess," he says.

"Management at all," she says. "They weren't wrong about all the data they had, it just wasn't the whole picture. I dunno, I'm not all the way through the argument yet."

"I won't quote you on it," he says. "And I think we're here."

The highway terminates at the foot of a staircase up a steep hill, obscured by dense fog, and the parking lot is empty.

"Have you ever heard anyone from Newfoundland admit when it's raining," she says, as they set off up the stairs. "Do you think this really doesn't qualify, or are they fucking with us."

"To be fair," he says, broadening his accent into a drawl, "Tourists probably deserve to be fucked with a little."

The stairs are wet, near-icy. She's more underdressed than Scott is, teeth chattering in the cold, rainwater trickling down the back of her neck. She can scarcely make out the tip of the promontory uphill and ahead, only partially illuminated by the lighthouse.

"Scenic," says Scott, at the top of the stairs. They pick their way gingerly across the gravel toward the lighthouse and the lawn beyond it. The edge, she notes with relief, is demarcated with a fence, and a sign with a dire warning about the risk of falls for anyone who trespasses beyond it.

The rain is heavier now, the wind freezing, the moon invisible, the sea vanishing into the fog only feet from the cliff's edge. The breakers crashing into the rock below are thunderously loud.

"What time is it," says Scott.

"Sunrise is soon, I set an alarm," she says. It had been five on the dot when they'd left the parking lot. Contemplating reaching into her pocket to check the time, she has a vision of her phone slick with rainwater sliding out of her hand and clattering on the wet rock beyond the fence, and leaves it be. Scott's hands are shoved into his parka, his shoulders hunched.

The pockets of her own softshell don't quite fit her hands. She wraps her arms around herself instead, tucking her fingers under her elbows. Scott notices, and sidesteps over to her.

"Don't be ridiculous," he says. Gratefully she slides one hand into his pocket alongside his. Not palm to palm, but his fingers find the spaces between hers to weave together by habit anyhow.

"Sorry," she says. "Should've brought gloves."

"No," he says. "I like your hand here."

Only decades of practice at hearing each other over any cacophony, speaking without speaking under their breath, makes her sure he'll understand her when she murmurs, "Where else do you like my hand."

His fingers tighten around hers and she feels his sharp intake of breath against her hair, and her phone's alarm rings at maximum volume, startling them both.

"Is that it?" says Scott, stepping forward and squinting east.

If the fog had begun to lighten with the sunrise, it was imperceptible.

"Guess it is," she says, scrambling to turn the alarm off.

"Want a photo for Instagram?" he asks. "I can take it for you."

"There's nothing to see," she says. "I think I'm good."

"Let's go, then," he says, "We're soaked," and he leads her back down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

In the parking lot, an elderly woman dressed for a walk in the weather in a windbreaker and neck gaiter strides briskly past them toward the promontory.

"She's rainin' some good," the woman says, nodding to them.

"Sure is," says Tessa, and Scott, stifling a laugh, elbows her lightly in the ribs.

She doesn't have an opportunity to speak to him alone for the rest of that day or the following two, between sightseeing and hiking tours, readings, and a bar crawl the full length of George Street, near the end of which he pulls her aside.

“Can you change your flight," he says. "Just push it back by a day. I mean, do you have something already on your schedule at home, do you have to—"

"I'm free 'til we leave again on Tuesday," she says. "I was just planning to catch up on sleep at home, why?"

"Alan Doyle's brother's got a place on a beach," he says, a note of triumph in his voice. "It's only a couple hours from here and we can borrow it for a day, he told me."

"What have you been telling total strangers about us," she says.

"That we like sightseeing and need a break from the crowd before we go back to work," he says. "It'll be great. I dunno what a cottage on the bay looks like, but he said there's a firepit and a rowboat. Town with a cute name, you'll love it."

Checkout is at ten the next morning. Unburdened by a rental car to return, she hauls her suitcases out to Scott's GLC, and against her better judgement, sleeps off most of her hangover while he drives west and then north, until he stops for gas at a crossroad town named Heart's Content. She ducks into the Superette across the highway from the Irving for provisions, a baguette, a comically oversized cellophane bag of summer savoury, blueberry danishes, instant coffee, a dozen bottles of the Quidi Vidi ale Scott had liked from the liquor store next door.

The cottage is more of a shack, it turns out: after a brief mistaken detour involving an exit marked Heart's Desire—"Doesn't sound different to me," Scott had said when they'd realized their error—he cuts the engine in front of the easternmost of a series of what appear to be one-room structures only a few feet from a low cliff above the water, within view of a pier down a gravel-strewn hill. The townsite is scattered houses, single-storey buildings, and a church, arranged in a broad smear around the curve of the bay.

"Quaint," she says, surveying first the cottage's peeling red paint as Scott unlocks it with a four-digit code he reads off his phone, then the dilapidated shed alongside it, the roof halfway caved in, a rusted padlock hanging open on its door.

The cottage is not ramshackle inside, she decides. The hardwood floor is scrubbed clean and the walls are plaster, burnished smoother than the recently refinished plaster from her own home reno. In the bathroom is an old clawfoot tub with a new shower kit, and it yields ample hot water.

"There's heated tile in here," she calls to him in the other room.

"There's an instruction sheet about where to leave the bedding and how to light a propane barbecue," he calls back. "And it's laminated. It's a damn Airbnb. Alan told me it was rustic."

"He should've known you were a real backcountry type from the Mercedes you rented," she says, reentering the main room to inspect the kitchen. The cabinets are stocked from the kitchen section of a Dollarama, sugar and canola oil and spice rubs, and the same cellophane bag she'd bought at the Superette, which the clerk had assured her was a Newfoundland staple and an optimal souvenir.

"The shed looked rustic," Scott says. "Come on."

Inside it is a rack of fishing rods, a small styrofoam cooler, a stack of flotation vests, a toolbox of lures, and the promised rowboat, which is evidently weatherbeaten enough to satisfy Scott's sense of outdoorsmanship.

"How do you feel about committing a crime," he says.

"There's ice in the freezer," she says. "I'll get the beer."

They haul the boat down the hill to the empty pier, the tacklebox and cooler stowed in the cabinet under the bow, and they clamber inside it, and Scott at the stern hands her an oar and shoves off with a flourish. The tiny bay is empty, too, and sheltered, although Tessa recalls the sound of the waves crashing against the foot of the cliff at Cape Spear with a shudder, and reminds him not to underestimate the North Atlantic even if it seems calm.

"You been doing a lot of fishing lately?" she asks once they’ve rowed out to the middle of the bay. A couple of other small vessels are rounding the cape, too far off to be distinct.

"We're still at work," he says. She dips her hand in the water beneath them, bitterly cold.

"I've never caught a fish in my life," she says, withdrawing her hand and rearranging herself to sit cross-legged facing him. "So you're gonna have to take the lead here. I'm a great cheerleader."

"You are," he says. She picks a lure for him from the tacklebox and watches him fumble with it, snag his thumb on the hook, wipe the blood off on his jeans, and cast the line.

"I'm also gonna disclaim any responsibility for your crimes, if one of those boats is the cops," she says.

"You're my accomplice," he says. "Call your sister and ask."

"In for a penny, in for a pound," she says, popping the cap off a beer with the bottle opener from the tacklebox and handing it to him. "My brothers always fly fished," she adds. "And only ever in the lake, and only ever for trout, so I'm a little at sea here."

"Ah," he says. "I understand. Only a little at sea, but not all the way at sea, because we're in a bay."

"Thanks for catching my drift," she says.

"Excellent," he says.

"Sun's out, puns out,” she says.

"It's overcast," he says, then, "Wait a second, I got something," and she lets him have quiet to concentrate on reeling it in, his brow furrowed.

Tessa wouldn't know a cod if it fell in her lap, which something does: a wriggling and glossy silver creature the length of Scott's forearm from elbow to fingertips, glancing first off her shoulder and then her thigh as he draws it too high over the side of the boat.

"Sorry," he says.

"It's perfect," she says. "Now I get to slap you with a fish someday when you least expect it, and you can't complain."

She averts her eyes when he unclips the aluminum bat from the bench at the stern. The sound of the single sharp rap to the head of the fish echoes back to their boat from the shore.

"The pact is sealed," he says. "Let's go eat."

"Do you know how to fillet it," she says.

"We're resourceful," he says. "I think we can figure it out."

The return to shore is an anticlimax; scarcely a few minutes of rowing with the wind at their backs. One of the other vessels has docked by the time they reach the pier, a pleasure craft bearing a faded FISHING CHARTER banner, and a young man is sitting on the bench in front of it gutting fish with a long knife, flicking their heads into a bucket at his feet. Scott gives her a meaningful look, then calls out to him. "Howdy."

"Howdy," she repeats to herself in a mortified whisper.

"Don't suppose I could prevail on you to, uh. We're not from around here," Scott adds, the fish hanging limply from his hand. "Couple beers in the cooler we could trade you."

"Cute mackerel," says the young man. "Got a licence?"

"Ah," says Scott. "Must've left it in the car."

"Just fuckin' with ya," says the young man, and nods at the cooler. "Make it three beers and make yourselves scarce after, and I'll forget I ever saw ya."

The fish is beheaded and filleted in moments, then deftly wrapped in butcher paper, and they're shooed bemusedly off the dock, "G'way witcha," and Scott tucks the fillets into his windbreaker pocket to haul the rowboat back up the rocky hill.

"What do you do with a mackerel," she asks when they're settled back at the cottage, the fishing instruments having been returned to the shed.

"Grill it, I guess," he says.

The fish is pungent on the barbecue, with oil and salt, even after Scott rubbed into its flesh the summer savoury from the kitchen cupboard. They devour it with the baguette from the Superette torn into chunks the size of her fist.

Next to the shed is a stack of firewood for the pit behind the cottage, and he builds a fire there while she opens the Ferryland memoir in the dying light.

"Do you ever wonder how different we would be if we didn't have the Olympics," she says to his back. "That was all we worked for all the time, and everything in our lives was about it, and we got it, but what would it have been like if we had more space. Breathing room."

"We didn't want breathing room," he says, sitting down on one of the Adirondack chairs clustered around the firepit, across from her.

"I guess," she says. She can feel him searching for eye contact and avoids it, gets up to add an unnecessary extra log to the fire, fusses over its arrangement.

"Have you been getting enough sleep," he says.

"No personal lives at work," she says.

Scott stands and disappears inside for a moment, and returns with his own book, some airport thriller she hadn't heard of, and drags over a chair to join her, close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder, which she does with only a few pages left in her epilogue and the fire reduced to embers.

"It's cold," she says. "And it's late, and I think we have to leave early tomorrow."

"We want to be back in St. John's by eleven," he says. "So we should be out of here around nine or so."

"Come on," she says.

There are two twin beds in the cottage, pushed against the wall opposite the kitchen. He doesn't say a word when she leads him to the one further from the door and clambers in after to lie next to him. She tucks her shoulder under his arm and curls her body toward him to fit on the narrow mattress. One of his hands settles on the small of her back.

"I'm sorry," she says, "For being too forward earlier. On the cape. It was five in the morning and I barely slept, it's been a while, actually, since I could, I don't know what—"

"You don't need to tell me about it, we're at work," he whispers. "Just tell me where you like my hands."

"In my hair," she whispers back, throat tightening around the words. He moves one hand to the nape of her neck and the other to stroke a flyaway from her forehead. The shiver that runs through her is bone-deep.

"Where else."

She brings her own hand to his wrist, drawing his fingers forward to her mouth, and feels more than hears his soft sigh when she parts her lips, breath hot against his palm.

"You're gonna make me say it," she says.

"Yeah, I am," he says.

"Fuck me," she says, a hot flush rising in her cheeks. "With your hands."

She shucks off her jeans and he skims his hand down the front of her Calvins, and she loses track of her words the moment he slips an exploratory fingertip inside her and draws it out again, smearing her wetness around, but she shows him with her fingers slid into herself alongside his what rhythm to set, grinding against the heel of her own hand. She's trembling uncontrollably when they finish with her, three of his fingers inside her, his other hand splayed across her abdomen, hers twisted in the sheets.

"I want you," she manages to whisper, but no sooner has she reached for his cock, throbbing against her hip, than he gently lifts her hands off him and sets them on his chest instead.

"Another time," he says, and kisses her hair.

The shower is almost too hot to stand, but she scrubs off the week's worth of work and the afternoon's sweat, and rinses the smell of woodsmoke from her hair, and returns to the tiny bed a new woman. In the intervening time Scott had changed into a pair of sweats and a Leafs t-shirt and dozed off. She's suddenly too exhausted to look through her things for even a T-shirt to wear and crawls in next to him without, back toward him this time, and his hand finds its way back to her abdomen, and she's asleep in moments. 

She tries again over breakfast the following morning, of bitter instant coffee and blueberry danishes, slightly stale.

"Do you ever think," she begins. "That our—our personal relationship, our whatever, is a finite resource."

"Like what," he says. "Like we blew it all to win the Olympics and it's never coming back?"

"More like—we pushed it to the limit of what it could take, and if we want it back, it needs, you know, more time than this."

"Like the cod stocks," he says.

"What," she says. "We're not a fish, Scott."

"I flipped through your book when you were in the shower. I know you think I'm illiterate," he adds, raising a finger to stop the interruption on the tip of her tongue. "You want a moratorium on overfishing the cod stocks of our love for each other. Don't say I'm wrong."

"Jesus," she says.

"Have you been thinking that all weekend," he says.

"Well, no," she says. "I was reading that for background, for the trip, because we're here as hosts and that's our job, so."

"Nah, you just like it when everything is a metaphor for everything else," he says.

"Lots of things are," she says.

"Here's something that's not," he says. "You slept on the drive out so it won't make a difference to you, but we're going back by the scenic route. Down the west coast of the peninsula instead of down the middle. Via Dildo. We're stopping for a picture with the post office sign even if it's foggy, because who knows when we'll be out here again."

"Ah," she says. "A classic."

They arrive back in St. John's with an hour and a half to spare before the flight to Toronto, both connecting to London, although there's less than a full day before their next work trip and it hardly seems worth the layover. Scott leaves her to supervise his carryon for a few minutes in the washroom, and she takes the opportunity to buy a full dozen doughnuts from the nearest Tim Hortons, miraculously without a line.

"Rule of airports, you can eat as many of these as you want," she says, shoving the box toward him when he returns to meet her in the lounge by their gate. "You gotta take two at a time."

"Speaking of deep-fried things. You never told me why we could order cod off a menu but not catch it ourselves," he says.

"Trawlers," she says. "Sorry, it was a couple chapters later and I forgot you asked. If you're a trawler and you're fishing for other stuff and you catch a few cod along the way, you’re allowed to sell them."

"Not to belabour anything, but what's the technical term for it," he says. "That you can, uh, go ahead with the cod so long as you're only out there to catch something else, strictly speaking."

"Oh, God," she says.

"It's your metaphor, I'm just making sure you see it through to the end," he says.

"It's not a metaphor, and you'd better not make it one," she says. "The technical term is incidental bycatch."

Scott roars with laughter.

"Sounds about right," he says when he's recovered enough to speak.

"Don't make me regret buying you doughnuts," she says, and hands him a third one, chocolate dip.

A few hours later, in front of her in the taxi queue at the airport in London, he asks, "How're the cod doing now?"

"It's actually not illegal to fish for them anymore," she says. "I read a DFO report on the plane, the book was outdated. Small quota, though."

"Just in case anyone ever asks you," he says.

"They’ve been worse, but it's still up and down," she says.

"So long as it’s better than before," he says.

"It's been twenty-seven years," she says. "And they think lifting the moratorium would ruin everything again, so it's still hands-off for the foreseeable."

"Except for the incidental bycatch," he says.

"I don't want to have to wait twenty-seven years to find out if we can be good for each other outside of work," she says. For a wild moment she thinks he might lean forward to kiss her, and her heart leaps into her throat, but he only nudges her shoulder with his own, as the last person in front of them steps into a cab and another pulls up behind it.

"I really was just asking about the cod," he says, voice gentle. The cab driver has taken one of her suitcases and he hoists the other into the trunk, then opens the door for her.

"Text me the picture with the post office sign," she says.

"Get some sleep," he says.

"I will," she says, but at home in the evening she'll concede defeat to her empty king bed and retreat to old sitcoms on Netflix downstairs on the couch, where she can only doze fitfully for maybe an hour at a time, or two, if she's lucky.


End file.
